Book Launch | Visible: Art As Policies for Care

Visible: Art As Policies for Care – Socially Engaged Art (2010—ongoing) reveals a decade-long research project by curators Martina Angelotti, Matteo Lucchetti, and Judith Wielander exploring the transformative potential of socially engaged art practices.
Weaving together fiction and reality, historical context, and contemporary analysis, the publication explores the intersection of art and the public sphere, responding to today’s climatic, social, and political urgencies.
Presented as a polyphony of conversations with artists, writers, journalists, activists, politicians, and community organizers, Visible captures a transnational movement shaping socially engaged art.
Date: 6 March, 2025
Time: 8 - 9.30PM
Venue: WH51, Common Room, Alserkal Arts Foundation
About the speakers:
Matteo Lucchetti is a curator, art historian, and writer. He is the curator of contemporary arts and cultures at the Museum of Civilizations in Rome. Since 2011, he has been the curator, with Judith Wielander, of Visible, a Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto and Fondazione Zegna project to research and support socially engaged art practices in a global context, with the first European Award for Socially Engaged Art. He is also a guest curator for the project Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters. He worked as curator of exhibitions and public programs at BAK Utrecht in 2016-2018 and was curator of the 16th Quadriennale in Rome. Recent curatorial projects include Gala Porras Kim: A Collection Returns With a Soft Touch, Museo delle Civiltà, Rome; DAAR: Borgo Rizza - Entity of Decolonization (winner of the Golden Lion at the 2023 Venice Biennale), for La Loge in Brussels, Madre in Naples, and the Berlin Biennale, 2022-2023; Raffaella Crispino: We Want Mirrors.A Journey Into the Matrix of Coloniality, MMSU, Rijeka, 2022; Marzia Migliora: The Spectre of Malthus, MA*GA, Gallarate; Sammy Baloji: Other Tales, Lunds Konsthall and Kunsthal Aarhus, 2020; Marinella Senatore: La piazza universale. Social Stages, Queens Museum, New York, 2017; De Rerum Rurale, 16th Quadriennale di Roma, 2016; Don't Embarrass the Bureau, ParaSite, Hong Kong, 2013; Lunds Konsthall, 2014; Enacting Populism, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, 2012.
Judith Wielander is an independent curator based in Brussels. Her curatorial research focuses on the intersection of art and social engagement. From 2002 to 2010, she was curator at Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto. In 2009, she initiated the Visible project in dialogue with Michelangelo Pistoletto, and has co-curated it since 2011 with Matteo Lucchetti. In 2010, she produced The Horror Show File, the first film in Wael Shawky’s trilogy Cabaret Crusades, which she co-initiated. Wielander was co-curator of Bordeaux Urban Art Biennale, Evento 2011, the Belgian Pavilion at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014, and curator of Le Jardin Essentiel at Parckdesign, Brussels, in 2016. From 2021 -2024, she was researcher and co-curator at the Expanding Academy at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp with Nico Dockx. In 2023–24, she has been Lecturer at the Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, and in 2025 she is conceiving an artistic proposal for the renewed post-graduated HISK program, Antwerp.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Alserkal Arts Foundation, 17th Street, Dubai, United Arab Emirates